Saturday, April 18, 2015

Is there nothing which the magic of an ex-Beatle can't do? Apparently not. Check out how Ringo Star and His All-Star Band shape what was probably the single-most mockable pop song of the whole 1980s into a sometimes jazzy, sometimes crunching, overall very cool rocker (and with Richard Page of Mr. Mister on bass just for fun!).

Saturday, April 11, 2015

Something a little different this Saturday: no live video, just an audio recording. But this is such a fine recording of such a wonderful, haunting pop tune from the 1990s--one that's only available because Brian Weatherman, who is backing up Martin Page on this song Page wrote, recently found an old copy of the recording--that I have to make an exception. Enjoy.

Tuesday, April 07, 2015

Tonight, a ballot issue here in Wichita, KS, to reduce the penalty for a first-time arrest for the possession of a small amount of marijuana won. Did it win big? Nope, but it did win decisively: 54% to 46% of the total votes cast. And that, frankly, may be the best possible result which we who supported this ballot issue could have hoped for.

Why do I think those result are better for the overall effort to challenge drug-war overreach than a blow-out win? Because this is just the first step. Now, here in Wichita, we will wait to see what our new mayor and the new city council will do as Kansas's Attorney General, Derek Schmidt, decides whether or not to make good on his threat to sue the city to force our government to ignore the results of the election, since it would involve Wichita police treating as an easily disposed-of criminal infraction the possession of a controlled substance which the state lists as a Class A misdemeanor, with heavy fines and a criminal record attached. If an injunction is laid upon the city, our government almost certainly won't fight it, and that will be that.

Except it won't be, because state legislators will be watching. They wouldn't be if the sentencing reform ballot issue had lost. And it's quite possible they also wouldn't be if it had won big--say, a 70%-30% blow-out. In such a case, it would have been very easy for the opponents of the measure to say to folks up in Topeka, "They won solely because they registered for this one issue a bunch of marginal, disaffected folk who can't possibly be counted on to vote normally." But they can't say that in this case, because the turnout in this election--with about 37,000 votes cast out of about 200,000 registered voters, or about 18% of the total--is unfortunately pretty standard for springtime city-wide elections. And moreover, if you look at the votes cast for the sentencing reform ballot and the only other city-wide contest--for mayor--the numbers are almost identical. Clearly, those who worked so hard to bring this reform issue to the voters did not manage a win by somehow flooding the ballot booths with thousands of disengaged, marginal, first-time voters. (If they had, voting totals would have been different, because they wouldn't have voted for mayoral candidates at the same rate, or else if they did the number of write-in ballots--which amounted to only 5% of all votes--for outright supporters of the sentencing reform issue like Jennifer Winn would have been much higher.) No, this ballot issue won a small but clear victory because thousands of standard Wichita voters were persuaded it was the right thing to do. And those are exactly the voters whom at least a few of those state legislators in Topeka will want to have on their side to stay in office.

So tonight, I'm feeling pretty good. My bet is that sentencing reform won't be allowed to happen in Wichita--but the people who will be frustrated by the state's actions in that regard are going to include thousands of ordinary voters in this mostly white, mostly conservative city, and that is the sort of thing that may really lead members of certain committees to wake up to not just a valuable reform in criminal justice, but an electorally beneficial one as well. This is how you build movements, folks. Door-knocking, signature-gathering, and vote after vote after vote.

Thursday, April 02, 2015

On next Tuesday’s ballot here in Wichita, KS, voters will be able to, whether they realize it or not, directly contribute to an ongoing struggle over the meaning and operations of democratic government in the United States. Specifically, they may speak as a city against their state. What follows from that may be interesting, to say the least.

The specific issue is a ballot proposal which would order the city of Wichita to reduce the penalty attached to the first-time possession of a small amount of marijuana (currently a class A misdemeanor, resulting in a criminal record and a fine of up to $2500 and a year in jail) to an easily-paid infraction (a $50 fine with no permanent record). I've contributed in a few small ways to the effort to get this proposal on the ballot, and now that it's on, I hope everyone in my city votes “yes.”

Many won't, of course. There are multiple voice urging Wichitans to vote “no” instead for a multitude of reasons. The most persuasive--or so it seems to me as I speak to people I know--are those which are most reflective of the interests of the law enforcement and media establishment: they oppose the ballot proposal not because they disagree that criminal penalties for marijuana possession are too great, or that the social costs of the drug war are experienced most severely upon those poor and more diverse segments of the urban population which most need fuller integration into the mainstream of city life, but because they simply believe its passage could force upon the city an unnecessarily complicated legal and constitutional problem. Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt has stated he would sue the city to prevent the ordinance from going into effect, and that’s a potentially expensive threat to deal with.

But I say: vote for the ordinance anyway. Why? Because forcing problems upon our elected leaders is one of the tried and true methods of moving policy conversations forward under our legal and constitutional system. Yes, as I've written before, a local change in marijuana laws might introduce a complicated inconsistency into the body politic. But that inconsistency would only reflect what democratic self-government often, I think, ought to mean.

I don't dispute that consistency in government is an important value; the old Hamiltonian argument about how executive "effectiveness" is really the only test for government (assuming it protects basic liberal freedoms) which matters has a certain persuasiveness to it. And in light of that argument, the issue appears rather cut-and-dried. Our state government here in Kansas--like all the other 49 state governments--claims authority over basic matters of law and order. That claim is supported by a fairly well-attested reading of the U.S. Constitution, which by implication clearly suggests that cities, as entities without any sovereign authority, are only allowed to wield that power which the states delegate to them. Until and unless the state allows the cities the power to make democratically-determined decisions about drug enforcement policy, they have no basis to claim it.

The problem with this conclusion, however, is that sovereign or governing “power” is far more than what is laid out in legal documents. It is also what practically operates in the context of actual case-by-case interpretation and rule-making; it is what we give our consent to through recognizing a law as legitimate. And "consent" itself is a tricky concept, involving such cultural and communitarian matters as identity and affection. If we believe in popular sovereignty, then presumably that power ought to be understood as resting in, or adhering to--and thus as being that which may be delegated from--those places where we, the people, actually reside.

Of course, that is easier said than formalized. For our residences are themselves nestled into other, larger, communities and associations of identity and allegiance, state and regional and national (and, for some, perhaps even global). Moreover, modern technology and economies have reduced--or, if you prefer, empowered--our many of our places of residency and labor so as to make over into nodes along vast networks, whether of roads or power lines or flows of financial data or corporate-issued information. And so perhaps there are good reasons, in a world of such fluidity, for a country like ours, with its established history both national and state governments, to reserve the legal, consensual exercise of democratic power to those governmentalities which have been specifically and constitutionally marked out. After all, don't forget that questions of scale, and the feasibility of commanding sufficient financial and material resources so as to even address any one of the many issues which complicate our borders come into play as well. Still, I would insist that all these concerns do not mitigate the earlier, Jeffersonian point: that if self-government ought to be place-centered, than there must be at least some times, and some cases, where we citizens should insist that, practically speaking, sovereign power really does belong to those localities where most people most immediately live. True, this could open the door to subdivisions ad infinitum. But speaking realistically, towns and cities, out of all such overlapping bodies in the United States, have a genuine historical integrity, as well as a recognized place in our popular imagination. As such, it seems eminently reasonable to support cities in their occasional "complication" of the smooth operations of other sovereignties, when those citizens who live there democratically wish it.

(On a long but highly relevant side note: a recent study of state-level allegiance in the United States makes the argument that, in contrast to the rhetoric of centralizers of both market and state varieties, large numbers of Americans still look to the distinct cultures and economic and geographic situations of their states as a source of identity, and thus consequently invest significant expectation in their state governments and constitutions as tools for the expression of that identity. Could the same be said for cities? Only in the case of the very largest and most notorious cities, the author thinks, not entirely consistently; after all, in making his defense of states he includes those with small populations--South Dakota or Wyoming or Delaware--while excluding many metropolitan areas which as such plausible sources of sovereign attachment whose populations dwarfs those states. He specifically names Wichita as a city where a distinctive political culture very likely could never emerge, and he may be right--but then again, the combined statistical metropolitan area of even a mid-sized city like Wichita is greater than that of the whole of Vermont, which of course, as a state, makes his list as a valid player in the dispersal of authority and attachment sweepstakes. He also suggests that cities can't work because they are rarely conceived by those who live there as "imaginary communities" (obviously invoking Benedict Anderson's classic work on the construction of national sovereignty here) in the terms which reflect their actually existing governing institutions. I would suggest that such a claim would require more study in how the residents of cities think about themselves--and in the meantime, would note that such an argument probably takes Connecticut or New Jersey out of his picture, since the folks who live there almost certain don't primarily understand themselves in relation to Hartford or Trenton, but rather to sprawling, unbordered the New York megalopolis. Ultimately, I think the only argument of his thoughtful analysis of state allegiance which can be consistently said to not apply to any cities of at least some significant size as well is institutional: city governments today, unlike the case of American cities in the 19th century, simply lack effective power. For the author of this study, who investigates the extent of state attachment mostly out of an interest in strengthening federalist and states' rights claims under out system, this conclusion simply supports directing our attention to those units of government which already have a formal constitutional place. But for those of us who are interested in enriching places of democratic self-government more than figuring out how to better balance a structure which doesn't especially prioritize that in the first place, the complaint about the lack of effective city power only brings us back to the original argument--isn't really so implausible that cities ought to, sometimes, strive to get it back?)

What I've said so far may sound either like abstract philosophy or demographic hair-splitting, but it's neither; it is, rather, the governmental reality which drives any federal arrangement of authority. Power-sharing, and the shifting grounds of expressions of that power, with the specifics always being argued about, and pushed back and forth one way or another, over commerce authority or health care or immigration or same-sex marriage or any number of issues--that's life under a system which seeks to balance the many and various ways in which people organize themselves for purposes of collective self-government. That life is filled with legal and constitutional complications, to be sure. Yet are those complications themselves sufficiently frustrating to make power-sharing seem to be not worth it?

If not, then by the same logic, even if it lacks explicit constitutional warrant, such a tolerance of confusing borders and contested jurisdictions ought to applies to the arguments between cities and states. And--to get practical from here on out--this is already happening. Most notorious in recent news cycles has been the successful effort different citizens groups to gain support from portions of the business community and push through minimum wage hikes in their cities--but beyond cities acting on their own to raise the minimum wage there has been actions taken on fracking, abortion rights, restrictions on pornography, labor rules, and much more. States, noticing this reality, are fighting back, both predictably and appropriately so. Either way, the democratic and constitutional conversation goes on.

And it there is any topic about which such a city-involving conversation is needed, it has to be disputes over the low-end of the drug war, such as the issue of the criminal possession of marijuana. Larger arguments about the addictive power of the drug and what it's use by members of a community might represent are valid. But beneath that, down near the ground, there is the fact that the likely serious criminal deterrent of harsh penalties arising from first-time possession is minor, while the social costs--to foolish first-time users, to young and irresponsible low-income able-bodied workers, to families struggling to hold themselves together, to neighborhoods and communities which desperately deserve active political representation--as well as the fiscal costs--building jails, setting quotas on already busy police departments, etc., all of which lands primarily upon cities--is great. In recent years other cities have struggled against their states over this issue, with diverse results. Denver, CO, Grand Rapids, MI, even Lawrence, KS, all took local action to change their approach to marijuana penalties; some of those actions ultimately contributed to eventual state-wide changes, while others have been subject to multiple court challenges, and yet others have sometimes just been left alone. Does that betray a frightening inconsistency in executive effectiveness, such as to render the public debate and activism which led to it as worthless? Not if we recognize that democratic dispute is simply a feature, not a bug, in our system (it's not like the fact that the most recent steps in scaling back drug war were taken by states themselves hasn't stopped continuingarguments!).

In a state like Kansas, where our governor and legislature have shown relatively little respect of late for the particular interests of cities when it comes to handgun policy, education funding, and more, I think any opportunity to show Topeka that the people of Kansas’s largest city (even if it is only mid-sized!) can, in fact, think carefully about matters of drug enforcement, and come to reasonable conclusions about what it should consist of, ought to be supported. It’s not just good policy, if enacted--it would be, whether ultimately enacted or not, the sort of thing that active citizens who care about where they live, and about what kind of democratic action which the people who live in those particular places ought to have available to them, should do.

Wednesday, April 01, 2015

I saw Fleetwood Mac on their "On With The Show" tour here in Wichita last night. What a fantastic show it was! It was obvious that both the band and the sold-out crowd were all sharing in the same general feeling: that this was, rather than a concert, a generational event, a triumph of artistry and fun over time and all the vicissitudes of the human condition. That may sound pretentious...but then, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks and Mick Fleetwood all, at different points during the night, delivered exactly that kind of light-hearted (yet obviously plainly earnest) pretension, turning autobiographical and philosophical and sometimes downright New Agey as they celebrated each other and magisterially presented one song after another. And none of those songs, I should note, lacked the full burning musical talent of the mature Fleetwood Mac behind them. Christie McVie (at 71 years old!), at the keyboards, had a glorious voice that still carried. Mick Fleetwood played and grooved and cackled behind his drum set like a deranged--bu immensely talented--Santa Claus. John McVie never said a word, and it was only rarely that his crunching blues sound took command, but his bass lines were always there. Stevie Nicks, without an ounce of apparent irony, did her Earth-Mother-Celtic-Goddness thing, her fringe spinning as he danced and swayed and sang like she did nearly 40 years ago. And Lindsey Buckingham? An absolute revelation to me. I knew he was a fine guitarist--but not that fine. His fret-work was astonishingly fast and strong, and his sound was clean and sharp, and he did it all as he leaped and kicked and yelped around the stage like Mick Jagger in his prime. Sometimes he got downright psychedelic--which perhaps was appropriate: whatever their English blues roots, this really still is a 1970s San Francisco hippie rock and roll band. Someone needs to tell Grace Slick and all the other former members of Jefferson Airplane who went slumming into Starship in the 1980s: this is the way it gets done.

I could help but think as we looked at these Social-Security-receiving (the youngest of the core group is Buckingham, at 65) musicians, consummate professionals all: how much pop and rock has changed in my lifetime. The fact that so very many of the best, most famous and influential bands from the 1970s and 1980s (which, asIhavenoted, was when my radio-smitten musical tastes were mostly formed) haven't changed is sort of the point. I can remember, as I first became acquainted with pop music as an adolescent, listening to these titanic (or so their appeared to me) gods of pop and rock--one of whom was, of course, Fleetwood Mac--realizing the shadow that they all played in: the real giants, the real pioneers, were out there, sometimes still stalking the earth, and being reminded to them--much less seeing them--was an occasion of amazement, awe, and often outright, even irreverent, disbelief.

Nowadays, of course, more than 30 years after people joked about 40-year-old rock stars, it seems like every person who is remotely serious about pop music and their dog has seen at least one these dinosaurs live, because they're everywhere. The Rolling Stones, at it for more than 50 years, are going back on tour. But forget about those pioneers; look at second and third generations of rock and pop bands, of whatever genre, and the longevity of the most successful of them. U2 will be 40 years old next year: still active, still recording, still touring. Metallica, 35 years old next year: the same. Pearl Jam, 25 years old: the same. All of this is by now, you might think, normal. Watching Fleetwood Mac, I heard and saw great performances, but I also couldn't help but be impressed by the huge, complicated business it was (our seats were high enough and nearer enough for us to be able to see behind the backdrop and the stage risers) to put on one of these shows. It was like a massive--but well-oiled and efficient--moving art installation project. There's a routine to it; these artists and the hundreds they employ with the millions of dollars these tours generate understand how to make it happen. And watching these experienced musicians move smoothly around the stage, it was undeniable that they buy into it. They're performers, and this is the way they deliver their performance. Why not keep doing it as long as mind and body allow; why walk away from your vocation, when the money and fans are still there? It gets to the point where you really wonder if Led Zeppelin or The Police or R.E.M. were perhaps just strange anomalies: successful bands that broke up and actually stayed broken up (for the most part, anyway).

As my friend Michael Austin always reminds me, it's all about us: we're the ones in our 40s and 50s, now in possession of some genuine buying power, who are willing to pay significant amounts of cash to see these talented folk whose tunes were so important to us 20 or 30 or more years ago. My friends and I swapped stories about who we'd drop serious coin to see. All of the ones named were bands and artists from decades ago. And, almost without exception (my friend who voted for Queen is obviously a bit out of running, unless a replacement for Freddie Mercury miraculously appears), it's all still possible. Capitalism may be responsible for any number of things that I dislike, but how can I fault a market system which smooths the way for folks with real talent to continue to deliver, even to me here in Wichita, Kansas, well performed music decades after I ever could have normally had any reasonable chance to see them live? Well done, you big beautiful impersonal technology-driven age-defying economic machine; well done indeed.

(Though honestly, Lindsey, would it have killed you to play "Trouble"? C'mon, man!)

Quotes

"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."